BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback

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It has been described as the hardest assignment in Washington D.C. It is the response to the sitting President after the State of the Union Address by a member of the opposition party. The President, speaking to a Joint Session of Congress, has a packed House chamber to talk with and a national audience tuning in. The person given the task to respond to it is usually alone in a room with a camera. It is by no means a fair matchup. 

In 1994, you also had the added stress of having to match T.V. Personas with President Bill Clinton arguably the greatest television Presidential orator of all time. Only Ronald Reagan could give the guy a run for his money. This daunting task would fall to Bob Dole, not once but twice in three years, as he was selected to give the Republican response to the State of the Union in 1994 and 1996. He volunteered, so you can't feel too sorry for him, but it was a tough assignment all the same. 

The speech Dole gave in 1996, is far better remembered, because he came across like an undertaker. However, in 1994, he was received in the homes of millions of Americans much better. The speech was singularly focused on the Healthcare debate, a debate the Republicans were winning. Dole had a very well put together chart from Senator Arlen Specter's office on just how big and expansive a bill the Clinton Healthcare plan actually was, and Dole did a masterful job of delivering the message. It was one of his better performances. Here it is in its entirety, plus a little bit from President Clinton's speech as well. 

When we finish those two addresses to the nation we will fast forward you to an interview with Bob Dole as he lays out the Republican agenda, and his thoughts on an array of subjects, for the rest of 1994. It is an interesting interview, and  one of the first times Dole drops the hint that he was indeed going to be a candidate in 1996 for President of the United States. 

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The Republicans did offer up an alternative to the Clinton Healthcare proposal. It was the Dole/Packwood Republican Alternative plan. 

In this press conference you will hear Bob Dole discuss the proposal and have Senator Bob Packwood lay the plan  out for the press corp.

Here are two Republican leaders trying to get their ideas on the table in order to address the growing healthcare crisis. In a lot of ways the plans were not far off but the political divide and the history of big majorities for democrats in congress would lead some decision makers on the Clinton side to try and push their proposal forward and sideline republicans. It would prove a disastrous decision and lead both plans to fail. 

It would be yet another two decades before Healthcare would be addressed again. 

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In this episode we take a look back at Hillary Clinton when she first burst onto the national scene in the early days of the Clinton Administration. She was a lady busy redefining the role of the First Lady. 

She was an active serious advisor to her husband. An accomplished career woman in her own right she had been the single person Bill Clinton had always relied on for his policy and often political advice. She was aggressively pushing an agenda all her own and the President was supporting it even as the press began to start focusing on her place in the Clinton Administration. 

All of this was happening on a wide variety of areas when President Clinton zeroed in on addressing the growing healthcare crisis in the country. Clinton decided he had more faith in his wife’s ability to get it done than on any other political ally or advisor. 

This is the story of that effort. What she did, how hard she worked at it, and how it failed largely due to her approach. The bill was to big and to expansive, and it had been written giving only lip service to Republican concerns and advice. In the Washington D. C. of that era it would prove to be a mistake not to include your opposition especially to push aside its leader, Bob Dole. 

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In this episode we look back at the other man who alongside, Bob Dole and Pete Wilson, spoke at both funerals for Pat and Richard Nixon. The Reverend Billy Graham was a giant figure in the second half of the 20th Century. His influence on the spiritual lives of people around the globe is rivaled only by the various Pope's who served during his lifetime. 

He was a major figure in the American Civil Rights movement, and he was an advisor to every President from Harry Truman to Barak Obama. He played an enormous role in 1968 in the election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency. This was learned in a recent blockbuster book by Dr. Luke Nichter who became the first author and historian to gain access to the VIP Notebooks that Billy Graham kept for over 70 years as his ministry grew and he became more and more involved in advising the major public figures of the era. 

In this episode we will hear from him, as we also say goodby to President and Mrs. Nixon, listening in on both eulogies, and we will examine the role Billy Graham played, through the Billy Graham Evangelical Association videos, in the the civil rights movement and with the various Presidents. Plus we will hear a segment of an interview with Historian Luke Nichter about the role Graham played in politics especially during the crucial year of 1968. 

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In this episode we cover the deaths of both Former First Lady Pat Nixon and former President Richard Nixon who both passed away within 10 months of one another in 1993 and 1994. 

As anyone who has been listening to our podcast on a long term basis knows, the life and career of Richard Nixon is a central focus of our show. We even have a sister podcast titled "The Richard Nixon Experience" that is a second avenue to listening to the many episodes we have produced on the President and his life. 

This episode adds some additional materials we have not used before mixed in with some of the material from our Nixon series that ran a couple of years ago. We have the newly released video of President Clinton meeting President Nixon for the first time in 1992.  We also feature for the first time the eulogy given for Mrs. Nixon by Bob Dole, and several portions of oral histories about President and Mrs. Nixon from the Bob Dole oral history project, with Dole, George McGovern, and Sheila Burke, Bob Dole's Senate Chief of Staff. 

We think this is an excellent addition to materials we have already produced on Nixon. It should add to the already growing materials that have been brought to the forefront of Nixon scholarship in recent years. It seems a growing appreciation has been happening for the Presidency of Richard Nixon, and we here at this podcast are proud to have played a small, and very early role, in that new appreciation for the 37th President and his many accomplishments.

 As we have said and written repeatedly we believe he deserves to be ranked among the 4 Greatest American Presidents, and it appears our podcast tag line is truly now at hand. The Renaissance of Richard Nixon is finally happening at last. 

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Jim Brady was a popular member of the Reagan campaign , and briefly the Reagan Administration. He was gunned down in 1981 in the attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. He lived, but suffered permanent brain damage, leaving him paralyzed and slow to speak for the rest of his life. 

His wife, Sarah Brady, would go on to lead a lifelong crusade to bring some form of gun control to America. This is the story of the passage of the bill named in her husbands honor. 

Bob Dole opposed the legislation. This episode we will hear the floor debate between Dole and Senate Leader George Mitchell. We will learn how Dole treated everyone fairly, and we will get to see a real test between the President and the Minority Leader. In this early battle between the two leaders of their party, Clinton would win. 

The Brady Bill passed the House of Representatives 238 - 189 , and it passed in the United States Senate 63 - 36 with an amendment. The Bill introduced one of the things that Bob Dole had been pushing for years, a National instant background check. 

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The North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, opened up the largest free trading block in the world. It was supported by every living former President in 1993, and Bill Clinton worked very hard to make it happen. He got support from an unlikely source.

Bob Dole. 

In fact, he had bipartisan support and opposition. Our own two Senators here in South Carolina, Strom Thurmond and Ernest Hollings, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, both opposed NAFTA's passing. 

This is the story of how it passed through Congress. You will hear from three living former Presidents: George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford, in the Bush speech you will also hear about an opinion piece written by Ronald Reagan in favor of NAFTA as well. It was a controversial piece of legislation, and while it delivered on many of the high hopes when it passed, it also did not stop some of the very concerns those who were opposed to its passage brought up in their arguments. 

In this episode we will hear some of the oral history that Bob Dole gave and you will hear for yourself some of , what sounds like , regret he voices, ever so briefly, in his interview about supporting the passage of the bill. 

Here is the story of NAFTA, how it passed, and what people thought about it as the historic debate raged in Washington. 

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As this series has unfolded I am sure that most people have listened in and thought it was more about President Bill Clinton than Senator Bob Dole. That will begin to change with this episode. This is where we will begin to use an absolute treasure of a find from the Dole Archives collection at the Robert J. Dole School for Politics in Kansas. 

In this episode we will be introducing you to these oral histories compiled by Richard Norton Smith of various major figures who served in the same era as Senator Bob Dole. I think you will get extraordinary insight not just to Bob Dole the man, and the era in which he served , but also valuable insights on how your United States Senate actually functions. 

We are very excited to be diving into this collection to help tell the story of one of the greatest leaders our nation has ever produced in Senator Bob Dole. We want to thank all of those who contributed to this collection, the Dole Institute and historian Richard Norton Smith. These oral histories are an absolute treasure. 

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In this our second episode of our tour through Georgia, we head out into rural south west Georgia to visit the community of Warm Springs. It was there in a small little resort town that Franklin Roosevelt discovered a treatment for his polio. It never cured him but it certainly revitalized him. The warm 88 degree water full of minerals allowed Roosevelt to move in the water like he was back on his feet again. it buoyed more than just his body, it lifted his spirit too. 

Roosevelt spent two thirds of his personal fortune, building a hospital to help those afflicted with polio, and that hospital still exists today helping with other disabilities and diseases. Roosevelt, who was born wealthy, met all types of people here in Georgia. He learned their struggles, their economic hardships, and the sky high cost of electrification. He vowed to help them, and he did. A great deal of the policies that made up the New Deal were from learning the problems of average Americans that he saw first hand in his adoptive home of Warm Springs. 

It was also here that he returned after his 14,000 mile trip to Yalta near the end of World War 2. He was tired, and it showed. He had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, his blood pressure periodically spiking, and it was clear his health was not good. He came here to Warm Springs to recuperate, and gather strength for the final push of the European War, and his dream of building a United Nations for peace. He did not live to see either of them. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, here at the Little White House in Georgia. We will tell that story in this episode too. 

Then we will head back out on the road and go an hour and a half deeper into Georgia to a tiny little town of around 524 people. It is so small, its downtown actually looks like a movie set. You would probably ride right past it if not for its very famous residents, former President and former First Lady Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter called Plains, Georgia home, for 100 years. We will visit their gravesites, their remarkable, and yet very modest home, and visit the high school museum both attended. 

It was their in that museum that we learned about his famous school teacher Ms. Julia Coleman, their work at the Carter Center, and finally stumbled on the only work of fiction, out of the 27 books he wrote during his long post Presidency. We bought a copy of the "The Hornet's Nest" the first novel ever written by a former President. 

We will take you through it all, and even walk you through downtown Plains, Georgia, in this episode wrapping up our tour through Georgia. 

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In this special, two part travelogue, we take you along with our host through Atlanta and south west Georgia as we visit several of the most historic spots in the nation. 

In this first episode we head into Atlanta and visit the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. We will look back on some of the major accomplishments of the Carter years and some of his post Presidency work helping with elections, eradicating diseases, and continuing to teach Sunday School in his local Church. We will in this visit show you around the museum and relive a few of these special moments. 

Then we will drive about five minutes down the street to visit the Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site run by the National Park Service. It encapsulates an entire Atlanta neighborhood and features the historic Church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King served as an assistant Pastor alongside his father. It also includes his boyhood home and an extraordinary museum about his life where you can see his Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, Atlanta boasts one of the few places where you can see two Nobel Peace Prizes on display with in five minutes of each other between Dr. King and President Carter. 

You can tour the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the King Center, and walk down by the reflecting pool and Eternal Flame where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and his wife Coretta Scott King are entombed. It is an extraordinary Historic Site and we hope you will tune in and learn about the Civil Right Era that was born here in this Atlanta neighborhood. 

Then in our next episode, we will head out into rural Georgia to visit the historic Little White House where Franklin D. Roosevelt stayed off and on for 21 years as he fought to recover from his debilitating Polio illness, and we will also visit the small southern , rural , Georgia town that Rosalyn & Jimmy Carter called home, Plains. 

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